Monthly Archives: September 2008

Columbus, OH — In a shocking turn of events, true freshman Ohio State quarterback Terrelle Pryor was revealed to actually be recently-incarcerated felon and former Atlanta Falcons quarterback, Michael Vick, in disguise. The revelation came as a huge shock to fans, players, and media alike, and has added yet another scandal to Vick’s already lengthy rap sheet. Pryor/Vick, who started in his first game as OSU’s first-string quarterback Saturday, ran for two touchdowns and threw for a third in their 34-12 victory over the Minnesota Golden Gophers before an observant Ohio State Buckeye student with a scarlet “block O” painted on his chest questioned aloud, “Hey! Isn’t that Michael Vick?” after Pryor removed his helmet on the way to the locker room after the game. Video, fingerprint, and DNA confirmation all corroborated the anonymous student’s accusation. “Well, I’m just flabbergasted,” OSU coach Jim Tressel said of the star athlete who was 6’6” and 235-pounds, despite supposedly being just 18 years old. “Gee willickers,” Tressel added. Other members of the sports community were equally stunned. “I really didn’t recognize him without that goatee and the long hair, but I could totally see it after they showed Pryor’s and Vick’s team photos side-by-side,” said former Miami Dolphins quarterback and current NFL free agent, Marcus Vick, Michael’s younger brother. Upon hearing the news, the Atlanta Police Department immediately checked Vick’s prison cell — only to find several pillows wadded up and covered by a blanket on Vick’s cot, next to a tape recorder playing snoring sounds on a loop. When reached for comment, Atlanta PD Police Chief Richard Pennington replied, “Really? So does this mean I can pick him up in my fantasy league? I really got hosed after [injured New England Patriots quarterback Tom] Brady went out for the season.” Vick was unavailable for comment, but eye-witness accounts say that seconds before he was forcibly shoved into the back seat of a Columbus PD police cruiser, Vick said, “And I would’ve gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!” referring to the approximately 50,000 Ohio State undergraduate students in attendance at the game. In an unrelated story, an unidentified OSU fan was found mauled to death by what police think was “some sort of feral pitbull” in an alleyway just outside of the Horseshoe, OSU’s football stadium, with only the block-O on his chest still barely recognizable. The investigation into who this male in his early 20’s was, and who would have motivation to attack him, is ongoing.

Spam Your Friends for Me!

Like this:

I’m done apologizing to you ingrates for not having enough time to write, so let’s just leave it at this: if I can find enough time to cram food, sleep, work, social activities and sports into any given day, and there’s any time leftover, then I’ll write. If not, I won’t. The suspense is killing you, I can tell.

Things you should care about this week (in order of importance):
+Dustin’s Fantasy Football Teams (won games in two of my three leagues this week)
+Massive Power Outages in the Columbus, Ohio area
+USC decisively spanking OSU in the City of Angels
+The Return of New TV Shows
+The Death of Golden Grahams
+The National Debt

And here’s why.

The national debt is gross. Debt is the opposite of money. And if I learned one thing in all my years of education, it’s that money is the root of all happiness. Or maybe it was that money can’t buy evil. Either way, I know for certain that you don’t want to owe money to the Chinese. It’s science.

Fact Number Two: other than Banana Nut Crunch, Golden Grahams is the greatest cereal of our generation, and yet for some reason, it’s been discontinued. I asked my friend Internet about this in order to find out more information, but other than a vague Wikipedia entry, there’s literally no information about when or why Golden Grahams has gone the way of the buffalo (you get the reference, PxPx-ers?). If you or anyone you know has information about the whereabouts of Golden Grahams, or knowledge of how their demise came out, please hook a brother up. I need to know that they didn’t give their cinnamon-baked-with-a-touch-of-honey life in vain.

A decent percentage of my readership is Ohio-based, so I’m going to try not to harp on this…but I was at The Coliseum (or in the parking lot, rather) for the OSU/USC debacle, and I must say that as a U of M fan (go Wolverines) whose season was over before it even began, it is a small comfort to see that OSU’s season has been similarly destroyed by a loss to USC and a more embarrassing almost-loss to OU. Obviously I would prefer that Michigan was winning, but if that can’t happen, I’ll settle for OSU losing. God bless college rivalry.

And now that I’ve done a sufficient amount of gloating, I wanna switch gears for a second and offer my sincere support to all the lovely folks of Columbus, Ohio who are still without power after the winds of Ike tore through town. And I mean support in the spiritual sense of the word, not the monetary sense, so don’t get too excited. Although, I guess since all of them are without electricity, they can’t really read this, so really I could promise anything and not have to follow through on it. So with that in mind, I hereby swear to give every single person in Columbus, Ohio and its surrounding suburbs a check for $500,000 and a back massage to go along with it. Suck on that philanthropy, Bill Gates! Where you at, son?! You got nothin’ on this charity!

And now, for a quick trip to…Fantasy Football Corner. A chance for you guys to hear about how I’m turning an innocent love of a pro sport into a way to sink several hundred dollars into a collection of loosely-concealed gambling rings.

League 1: The Left Coast Losers — After a disappointing loss in the first week of league play, the Left Coast Losers rallied in week two with a 143-109 victory over former league champions, The Schlitzkrieg (helmed by Mike Ulring). Brandon Marshall wins the MVP of the week award for his 40-point fantasy performance. Our W-L record so far is 1-1

League 2: The Los Angeles Larcenists — Despite a last-minute bye week that negated two of my top starters (Willis McGahee and Andre Johnson), my team overcame a 70-point deficit to win the game 136-134 against The Dakota Sioux (coached by Steve DeWeese, who was actually visiting LA the very weekend our teams played). W-L record is 1-1.

League 3: Frodo’s Frozen Brogurt — As usual, the “Bros and Hos” league that I’m in with my former roommates and their significant others has been less than kind to me, as I got trounced again this week by (former roommate and landlord) Phil Nagy’s team, the Quail Hollow Jumping Cars. The final score for the game was 96-154, putting me at 0-2 for the season thus far.

I see that ESPN360 is about to start, which means I need to shower off the leftover sand that’s clinging to me from my earlier beach trip and get ready to start the night’s activities. Remember, friends don’t let friends root for the Yankees. Also, I might be giving up drinking for 30 days just to say I did it, and it’ll be a nice way to get my tolerance down a little bit before my 25th birthday comes around. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.

Until then, cheers,
Dustin

Spam Your Friends for Me!

Like this:

Look, we need to talk. I know I’ve been kind of distant these past few weeks, but I’ve just really needed some time to get centered, to readjust — it’s not you, it’s me. Honest. Not that you haven’t been great to me. You’ve always been there for me when I needed you, and I’ll never forget the good times we had. When it’s all said and done, I just really hope that we can still be friends. Maybe you’ll leave a comment about one of my notes, maybe I’ll mention you on occasion in one of my blogs…it’ll be better this way for both of us, I promise. You’ve got a lot of great qualities, and anyone would be lucky to have you — you need to find someone who can take care of you like you need, and treat you how you deserve. You need someone who will blog once every day or two, rather than someone like me who only seems to write when it’s convenient for me, without consideration for your schedule. Ultimately, you deserve the commitment of a writer who can be there for you when I can’t, a blogger who thinks of your needs first, and an author with whom you can really forge a consistent, long term reader relationship. And I just don’t think that’s me. I’m sorry. I’ll still be here, sharing with the world as I have time, but I’m just not in a place where I can commit to consistently writing for you more than 1-3 times per week. I hope you can forgive me.

-Back in Blog-Ok, so I’ve been MIA for a few weeks — were you really that surprised? The first rule of virtual, blogging life is that it doesn’t take priority over real, actually-happening life. Or sleep. Sleep has become a much higher priority now that I’m out of college and staying up till 3am doesn’t mean I was out partying with friends, it means I probably just stumbled onto a Mythbusters marathon and couldn’t pull myself away from the mystery of the frozen underpants (busted) or the myth of the exploding facial hair (confirmed). However, all this time of being too busy means that I probably have lots of exciting stories and whatnot to discuss (busted), I may have been dating some über hot babes (busted), and that I have probably been spending too much time playing Super Mario Galaxy on my roommate’s Wii (confirmed).

-Tropic Thunderstruck-What Tropic Thunder lacked in sheer, piss-your-pants hilarity, it made up with in the chemistry of the main characters. It’s rarer than you might think to see comic superstars work together who actually look like they’re having fun. Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr. and comedic-anchor Ben Stiller all performed at the levels of humor you’d expect, but the resulting film is greater than the sum of its A-list parts. Regardless of whether or not it was true, these guys seemed like they really enjoyed working with each other, and that’s plays a lot better to today’s (somewhat) more sophisticated audience than the lame fart jokes and cheap sight gags of some worthless “comedy” like Disaster Movie and its predecessors.

-You Shook Me All Season Long-Football. College, professional, videogame, fantasy, backyard, etc. Tonight is THE official kickoff of the NFL’s season, which means for the next six months or so, I can have football as often and in as many different ways as I want. This is heaven in HD. And yet for some reason, the Bengals look just as crappy in high definition as they did in regular broadcast. Oh well, I guess DVR can’t fix everything.

-Interstate to Hell-They did some random construction on the 405 the other day, and as usual, made no effort to tell the beach community residents who have to trudge up and down that accursed freeway to get to and from work…on the upside, I bought a bunch of new CDs that I’ve been meaning to get for a while, so I had plenty of entertainment for the car. The moral of the story? Life’s really not so bad, once you decide as much.

-The Shaver’s Edge-I’m just gonna put it out there: I need a new electric shaver. The one I currently own is old and dull (sounds like my last relationship — ba-zing!), and since it doesn’t look like I’m gonna get to stop shaving anytime soon, I think it’s only proper that I try and make it as pleasant of an experience as possible. Any suggestions for a brand and/or model to try would be more than welcome.

-Not-So-Dirty Deeds Done Not-So-Dirt Cheap-For those of you too busy/uninterested to find out on your own, I have once again pulled the ol’ job switcheroo, moving from my current place of employment to a club/restaurant about 100 feet away. It’s called Rush Street, and it’s named/designed after a supposedly swanky part of Chicago (though I’ve yet to confirm this with any Illinois residents). This job lets me use my classic charm and wit to con people into buying superfluous bottles of wine and giving me 20-25% of their meal’s cost. God bless America. If you’re local and want to come visit, it’s in the Culver City part of LA and you can google directions. If you’re not local and want to come visit, you can crash on my couch and I’ll buy you a meal or two. That’s worth the price of a plane ticket, right?

-Hell’s Belles-Aside from being a great name for an all-female AC/DC tribute band (no offense to the members of AC/DShe), it seems like people in showbiz are finally adopting/acknowledging the femme fatale as a legitimate figure in film and television once again. Obviously this is not a new concept, since the term was coined in a time when sliced bread hadn’t been invented yet, but it seemed like for all the supposed feminism and equality of the 70s, 80s and 90s, our female screen stars mostly reflected traditional and occasionally outdated stereotypes with very few exceptions (I don’t know that G.I. Jane really did equality any favors). But now with megastars (like Angelina Jolie) and average-size stars (like whoever the lady from the Underworld series of movies is) making some real money in Hollywood, it seems to be expanding the industry’s ability to think outside the box and come up with better, more original stories — rather than trying to peddle the same old characters and plot to us over and over again. This is good news for moviegoers the world over, and I just thought I’d share my little observation with you. It also doesn’t hurt that they’re really, really hot.

-For Those About to (Pass the) Rock, We Salute You-So I’ve never been a Seattle Supersonics (former NBA team) fan, per se, but they deserved better than to be discarded like some clingy girl’s phone number and shipped to Oklahoma City under a new moniker and new management. And as if losing their storied tradition wasn’t enough of a blow, the new Oklahoma team’s mascot/nickname is the Thunder. The Oklahoma City Thunder. Dude, that is awful. It sounds like it should be the nickname for some AAA League Baseball team based in Des Moines, Iowa, not the mascot of a top-tier professional basketball team. We’ve already got the Miami Heat, and we don’t need our NBA games to start sounding like weather forecasts (“Well Stuart, we can expect to see some major Miami Heat roll in this weekend, followed by some weak Thunder out of Oklahoma City. Chance of scattered showers, 60%. Back to you.”). If you all write your local senator, maybe we can get the name changed to something really cool like the “Oklahoma City Dustins.” I mean, out of all the potentially badass mascots/nicknames out there, why go with the Thunder? Just so they can use “Thunderstruck” as their theme song? Anyone that desperate to make an AC/DC reference should probably go outside every once in a while and get a life.

Well gang, it’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock and roll, so I’m gonna head out now and get a head start. See you at the top.

Cheers,Dustin

P.S. I know this is where the picture usually goes, but…I just wrote two and a half pages of AC/DC puns for you — do you really want a picture to go with all that? My next post will be funnier and shorter, promise.